“You know, Dickie,” he was saying. “It’s very romantic of you to go off like this into the blue—very romantic.”
Graecen was flattered. It was really, when you considered it. A poet en route for Elysium. It was curious that he had never written a poem about death.
Baird leaned back from his seat beside the driver and suggested lunch at a wayside inn. They all got out in the rain and hurried indoors. It was still cold.
“Ah,” said Hogarth. “How lucky you are to go south.”
“Yes,” said Baird, whose enthusiasm mounted at the thought of the perennial blue skies and temperate winds of the Mediterranean. It was as if a film had lain over everything—the magic of Greece, Egypt, Syria. He felt the premonitory approach of the happiness he had known before the war.
They had an excellent meal before continuing their journey. Graecen, who had rather a tendency to be frugal when it came to ordering food, stood them a lavish lunch. His cigar-case was full too: so that they settled back in the car with the air of millionaires making a pilgrimage to Carlsbad.
“This chap Fearmax,” said Baird suddenly. “What is he?”
Hogarth looked at him for a second, and quietly closed one eye. “I want Dickie to meet him,” he said. “He is the founder of a psychic society—almost a religious brotherhood. Dickie, he will do your horoscope, read your palm, and terrify you.”
Graecen looked rather alarmed. He was very superstitious. “I think you do him an injustice,” said Baird, and Hogarth nodded. He said: “Fearmax is most interesting. He has hold of one end of the magic cord of knowledge. There’s no doubt that he is a very curious fellow, and a suffering one. I hope the blue sky does him good too.”
They cruised down to the dock, where the Europa lay at the great wharf, like a rich banker smoking a cigar. Hogarth’s son was thrilled by her size and the opulence of her lines. It was too late for prolonged conversation, and when Hogarth and son stumbled ashore after an admiring inspection of Graecen’s state-room, there was little to do but to wave to them, and watch them get into the big car. There was no sign of Fearmax. Baird noticed the couple he afterwards came to know as the Trumans standing at the rail waving shyly to an old lady who stood sniffing on the pier.
A thin spring rain was falling once more. The gleaming cobbles stretched away into the middle distance—a long aisle of masts and funnels. Graecen stood for a little while gazing over the side with a sudden sense of hopeless depression. The boat-train was in and a straggle of passengers advanced towards the gangway of the Europa followed by their baggage piled high on trucks.
“I expect we’ll leave tonight,” he said.
“Yes,” said Baird, his heart suddenly leaping at the idea; he settled his neck back against the wet collar of his coat and repeated the words to himself slowly. They would cleave that blank curtain of spring mists, dense with wheeling sea-birds, and broach the gradual blue horizon in which Spain lay hidden, and the Majorcas. He wondered why Graecen should look so downcast.
“I suppose you feel sad, leaving England?” he said lightly; it was merely a conversational politeness. He was not really interested in anything but this feeling of joy which slowly grew inside him at the prospect of leaving it all behind.
“Yes and no,” said Graecen guardedly. He was sad because there was no one who shared his confidence in the matter of his death-sentence. He felt all of a sudden damnably alone; he wondered whether there was a ship’s doctor to whom he could speak openly—to create that sense of dependency without which his happiness could not outface the shadow which lay over him. Baird was pleasant enough—but too self-contained and uncommunicative. He went below to supervise his own unpacking.
It was now that Miss Dombey came down the deck at full tilt, being dragged along by her fox-terrier, which advanced in a series of half-strangled bounds towards the ship’s cat. “John,” she cried in piercing recognition, and would have been carried quite past him had not the lead conveniently caught itself in some obstruction. It was an unexpected displeasure. Miss Dombey was still the red-freckled parson’s daughter he had known so long ago in the country; only she had become more strident, more dishevelled, less attentive to her dress as the urgency of her Mission had increased: the Second Coming, he remembered, had been predicted for the following year. Miss Dombey had been working frantically to advertise its approach in the hope of preparing as many souls as possible for the judgment they would have to face. Her voice sounded more harsh, more emphatic and crackling than ever. She talked like someone with a high temperature. She was going to Egypt to try and prepare the infidel for the expected event. Baird swallowed his displeasure and exchanged a quarter of an hour’s small talk about the village. Miss Dombey had seen his father: she said so with the faintest reproach. He was looking much older and seemed to have fewer interests. Tobin was bedridden, and his wife had been gored by a bull. Miss Tewksbury, the postmistress, had been sentenced to six months for writing poison pen letters to the Vicar’s wife: it was curious—she had always been so fond of the Vicar.
Baird excused himself and went below full of annoyance at the thought that he was going to have her for a travelling companion. Through an open door he caught sight of Fearmax wrestling with a cabin-trunk. So he had arrived after all. His own dispositions were easily made. He had taken the barest necessities for the journey. The two anthologies he put aside for the moment. His little India-paper copy of the Phaedo seemed to be the sort of thing one always took on journeys and never read. Lying in his bunk and idly turning the pages he fell asleep, and when he awoke there was that faint interior stir of excitement, that faint preoccupied stillness of a great ship heading out to sea, that told him they were off. It was true. A strip of dark sea curled between them and the bleak grey cliffs with their small fractured groups of houses shining dun and drab in the late evening light. The Europa moved without a tremor—as if she were moving down rails. A bell rang somewhere, and the fans in the corridors suddenly started to bore out their little furry cones of sound. Then they too fell silent; and from the very heart of his preoccupation he distinguished the small even pulse of the ship’s engines driving them southward.
Baird entered the saloon in dread of Miss Dombey, for he saw that he would sooner or later have to introduce her to Graecen—the innocent Graecen who had done nothing to deserve such an imposition. To his surprise, however, they seemed to get on quite well together. It was perhaps because no sooner had he introduced Miss Dombey than he found she had introduced her own Mission. “Thousands are living in the shadow of death,” she said juicily to Graecen. “And my job is to prepare them for the state of death, to wake them up, to shrive them, if necessary.” This struck something of a chord in Graecen’s heart. He had been pondering on his condition as he unpacked, and these forthright propositions seemed to him to refer almost directly to his own mental and spiritual state. Had he thought enough of death? Had he prepared himself? The idea had seemed repugnant to a poet, a hedonist. Miss Dombey’s vehemence gave him a jolt. It was like meeting a prophet. She clawed her hair off her forehead and gave him a brief outline of what was going to happen when the Second Coming started to be fulfilled. Graecen listened to her with incredulity mixed with a certain not unpleasant fear; it reminded him of his childhood at Rickshaw Hall—the stories of hellfire and brimstone which his mother had told him and which he had believed. Miss Dombey was enchanted by so influential a convert. She pressed upon him no less than five separate tracts, which he promised to study at leisure. Baird looked on curiously at this little scene, wondering whether Graecen’s obvious good nature made him indulgent; but, to his surprise, when Miss Dombey left them, he turned to him and said: “Baird, what an extraordinary woman. Thank you for introducing her.” In some obscure way he felt glad to be in touch with someone actively concerned with death—even if it wasn’t his particular death. The tracts, however, were awful. He tried to read them but gave it up as hopeless. The prose, to begin with, was so bad; one could not be carried away by fair
y tales of the Second Coming written in this Praed Street vein. Nevertheless, Graecen clung to Miss Dombey.
As for Fearmax, he was concerned with problems of a different order. He lay for hours in his cabin with his eyes fixed on the ceiling. His door was always open, so that whenever he passed Baird could look in and see him there, hands crossed on his breast, collar open, staring at the paintwork. He did not appear to any meals for the first twenty-four hours and Baird wondered idly if he were having a severe bout of seasickness; yet his door stood open, and whenever Baird passed it he saw him lying there. Led by the promptings no less of curiosity than of courtesy, he at last tapped at the door and put his head in, asking Fearmax in his pleasant way if he could be of any use to him. For a time he did not seem to hear—but at last, with an effort, he turned in the bunk and raised himself on one elbow.
“That’s kind of you,” he said hoarsely. “Very kind. No. I am just resting, that’s all. I do not suffer from sea-sickness. But I hate journeys. Do come in.”
The cabin was heavy with the smell of cigar-smoke. There were several large stoutly-bound books lying beside the bunk, a rosary, and a number of yellow envelopes full of papers. Fearmax looked pale and weary.
“I’ve never been out of England before,” he said. “It’s rather a big adventure for me—like the start of a new chapter; and I am trying to read the omens. They are very strange, very strange.”
Between the wall and the bulkhead lay a bound set of Ephemerides, and a notebook covered with jottings. “Omens?” said Baird. (“Omens?” said Graecen later in a much higher key of superstition, of anxiety, when Fearmax made the same remark.)
“You probably don’t believe in astrology?” said Fearmax. What was one to say? It was on the tip of Baird’s tongue to reply, “Not since the atom bomb was discovered,” but he checked himself. Fearmax went on in his hoarse voice.
“I didn’t myself once, but even if it’s an inexact science I’ve found that it could tell me things: potentialities of my own character, for example: forces inherent in the world around me. At any rate I worked out a progressed chart today in the train for the next few months. It shows some curious things. As far as I can see I am in danger of being lost in one of the tunnels of the Great Pyramid.”
Baird stifled his amusement. There was something oddly impressive about Fearmax. He did not talk like a quack, but like a man who had been genuinely in search of something—some principle of truth or order in the world: and who had failed in his quest. With a bony finger the medium traced out the houses and planets on his chart, talking of conjunctions and trines. The influence of Saturn caused him considerable anxiety it appeared. He had no fear for the journey while he was at sea—the influences are favourable. But somewhere on land, in the company of others, there was to be an accident. The nature of that accident he could not guess as yet—nor whether it would be fatal. He simply knew it would assist him in his discovery of “The Absolute”.
It was an odd word to hear at such a time and place, Baird thought. But then Fearmax, as Hogarth said, was an odd person. To be engaged in a search for The Absolute was, however, a fine medieval conception. He wondered what it could meant
The Voyage Out
It was some few days before Fearmax emerged from his seclusion; indeed he was not the only one that sunlight persuaded to emerge from the privacy of his cabin. Yet Graecen found the sight of him a little distressing; his nervous habit of pacing the deck, as if he were on the look-out for expected catastrophe; his habit of sitting for long intervals with his head sunk on his breast, of making notes in a leather-bound notebook. His preoccupations seemed to match so little with those of the rest of them that even Miss Dombey was abashed in his presence. He confessed to a slight knowledge of palmistry, and once he took Graecen’s hand, without a word, and studied its lines and curves with great attention. “You have a bad heart,” he said, and Graecen felt the sudden grip of an icy hand upon his throat. Nothing more.
The Trumans, despite their unprepossessing appearance, turned out to be rather a find. They were not only amusing in their way, but self-sufficient and out to enjoy the journey. Truman, they discovered, played and sang comic songs at the piano in the saloon, and enjoyed nothing better than an audience. He had once been a member of a concert party, he said (“a real proper black coon”) and his repertoire was inexhaustible. In particular Baird enjoyed a comic recitation entitled “A Martyr to Chastity”, which he produced whenever Miss Dombey was around. The rawness of the jests usually made her run for cover. Indeed they found that the only way to shake off Miss Dombey was to be seen with the Trumans. She could not bear them. An attempt to interest Mr. Truman in the Second Coming had been a failure.
Fearmax, however, seemed already to have established some sort of link. No sooner did he appear on deck than Mrs. Truman nudged her husband with evident excitement. They converged upon him. Did he remember them? He did not. Once, long ago, he had got in touch with Mr. Truman’s elder sister at Shrewsbury during a séance. The medium passed his hand over his forehead and muttered something about having met so many people; but he seemed flattered. Mrs. Truman had even read a book of his on the astral self.
On the whole the company was not uncongenial, thought Graecen as he lay in his bunk to take the afternoon nap prescribed for him by London’s most fashionable doctors. He had been keeping a diary for the first time in his life and he was propped up by three pillows, his fountain-pen poised over the page on which he was to account for his actions of today. “Account for.” There it was again. That hell-fire note, influenced by Miss Dombey’s preaching no doubt. He ruffled the pages slowly, reading his own large feminine handwriting with slow pleasure.
“Little enough”, he noticed on one page, “have I done to render, as it were, a tidy account of my stewardship on earth, before taking leave of it (the earth). A peculiar sense of emptiness fills me. What am I? What have I been? I can think of little on either score to interest a recording angel. I have been neither good nor bad. The few sins of my grosser nature (Anne, Mrs. Sanguinetti, etc.) would, I am sure, all but cancel out with those few virtues, a quiet life, acts of kindness to friends, etc. I cannot see myself being damned.…”
Dimly, above his head, he could hear the piano in the saloon being strummed in the brisk manner affected by Mr. Truman, while that ineffable voice, half-talking, half-singing, uttered the opening phrases of “A Martyr to Chastity”:
I’m a martyr to Chastity
I’m a victim of laxity
Damned from the cradle I was.
Graecen read on thoughtfully. “I cannot see myself being damned, nor can I see myself being exalted in any way. What, then, is the spiritual fate of the very ordinary person after death?” What indeed? It seemed to him that in the last few weeks all those questions which have baffled the minds of men, had accumulated round him, importuning him for a solution; or, if not a solution, at least some ratification in his own mind as beliefs. The immortality of the soul? The nature of the Trinity? Was progress an illusion? He had simply nothing to say about any of these things. The diary went on: “In some ways I feel very immature, as I do not seem to have any decided opinions about the basic problems of the day. Or is there a discernible attitude to things visible in my poetry?” He shut his eyes and thought about his poetry; all that could be got out of it was a thin Khayamish hedonism, filtered through Georgian influences. “I suppose”, the diary summed up, “that I am rather an unsatisfactory person really.”
Graecen turned back further in the diary and glanced at the period of a week before his decision to resign and set out for Cefalû. Tea, dinner and lunch engagements followed hot upon each other’s heels. There was almost no thought directed upon himself, upon his own inward workings: “Feel rather low,” he saw in one place, “Heart not compensating again.” Further down the page he came upon the note: “If Hogarth were not my oldest friend I wonder whether I could tolerate him for a second? Callous. Yet somehow warming.”
He grimaced imp
atiently. This was hardly the kind of literary legacy one should leave behind. He had bought such an expensive diary too—twenty-one shillings. He pictured himself writing madly as his life drew to an end; the mantic phrases of some English Rimbaud written on the edge of the abyss. But Rimbaud was only a child. This reminded him of his age; it was some time now since he had worried about getting old—all his energies had been spent in worrying about keeping alive. Mrs. Sanguinetti had said that his hair was getting thin at the back. Graecen stood up and tried to verify this observation in the shaving mirror. It was an impossible task, however, and he gave it up to return to his bunk. He sighed and took up his pen again. He would try to write something simple and honest; he would trust to time to make it moving. A corner of his tongue showed between his lips as he started.
“Today was the first lovely day. We are beating down the coast of Spain.” (As an afterthought he deleted the second verb and replaced it with “sweeping up”.) “Some vague brown cliffs came out of the dawn-haze to greet us; a chapel, a lighthouse; and one small brown man, with a string of onions round his neck who waved a minute arm like an insect in answer to our gestures. The air has suddenly turned warmer and the weather much clearer though the sea is still rough. This morning I noticed the girl I spoke of yesterday as seeming to be ill; I saw her lying in the sun asleep, stretched out in a deck-chair, her body swathed in a rug. The wind was moving her thin fair hair on her forehead. As I passed I noticed that a book lay open on her lap and with my usual bookish curiosity I stooped down over her shoulder to see what it might be. By the strangest of strange coincidences it was Greville’s Modern Poets, and it lay open at the poem of mine called ‘The Winds of Folly’. One may imagine my surprise, pride and pleasure. It is so seldom an unknown writer has the fun of seeing someone read his work. I intended on my second trip round the deck to speak to her and find out what she thought of it and the other poems in the book, but when I returned she had gone below. Never mind. I shall reserve this little conversation for some more propitious moment.”
The Dark Labyrinth Page 9